Caught In A Storm
by DorianGray91
Summary: Bored of the same old? Fancy something different? Something mysterious, tantalising, compelling, and rather well-written? Something that gives a new slant, a new puzzle, and most of all a new and evocative atmosphere? Well, then. Come along.
1. Chapter 1

He came with the storms.

Whenever lightning streaked across the darkened sky like so many blinding cracks in the Universe; whenever thunder came tumbling down from the misty hills to grunt and bellow its rage; whenever rain cascaded in sheets or in great round pelting drops. He was there.

I would pull aside the thick rippling curtain, rub the vapour from the cold panes of glass, and look out onto the moors. The mountains, the forests in the valley, were swathed and concealed in grey sepulchral fog.

It was just us, in our house. Our big solid old house like a hunched traveller on that lonely heath. The wind tearing into its crevices, making it shriek like a lost explorer calling for help. In the middle of nowhere. It had been that way forever; just the house and the moors and the mountains, and us, inside.

And yet he found us.

Perhaps he had heard the cries of the lonely stone in the gales.  
Maybe he wanted to help; maybe he wanted to hear it scream.

In the sleet, in the downpours, in the battles of the angry sky, and the rolling dark tangles of cloud like a horde of demons from the hills – he was there. He stood there. I watched from the vapours of the cold glass panes. Watched him watching me.

He looked like one of us. Dressed like an ordinary man, but he wasn't. You could tell by the way he stood.

Mystery and jeopardy were etched into every line of his silhouette, as the night pooled out at his feet and his features became indistinguishable. The weather seemed to curve around him, the rain sweeping into columns of glorious shimmering waves about his still body. He was always so still. Just watching.

You would think I'd wonder what he was doing there, in the cold and the wet and the loudness of the thunder giants. You would think I'd ask him. Invite him in. I never did. Somehow I felt that if I opened the great oak door he would dissolve into the rain like a phantom, and never come back. Or worse – turn into an ordinary man. I wanted to keep the magic. I savoured the moments of wild awful clashing crashing weather, when I could look at him, in the heart of the storm, and marvel at his difference, at his otherness.

I didn't feel glad or excited. Just a sort of rising awareness, of something out there, something beyond me. Knowing that there really was a world beyond the house, beyond the moors, beyond the mountains. It settled me. I always slept better on those tumultuous nights, while the others were kept awake by the noise of the ancient wind-screech of our building.

I also kept him a secret.  
Nobody else seemed to notice him, and I never pointed him out to them.  
Just watched him, watching me, from the cold glass panes.

Living proof that we were not alone in the world. And – something told me – not alone in the Universe either.

I dreamed of his eyes that held eternity. And eternity did not run straight. It looped and fell back on itself and crossed and span in dizzying ways. All of this I saw, in his eyes, in my dream. His dream eyes looked into me, and told me what I was. But when I woke up I had always forgotten the answer.

He never knocked on the door, never did anything but stand and watch, taking in the bent back of the house, like a crooked hag wailing, the glimmers of candlelight in the windows, her many unnatural eyes. I tended to hide my candle in case he saw me too clearly. I wanted to be mysterious as he was mysterious. And I wanted to avoid the others' attention. He was my secret, and candles would only spoil things.

I am saying all of this because I want you to know what things were, then. What life was. The moor and the house and us inside, and nothing else ever, forever. That was the world.

I am saying all of this because I need to remember it, because everything is so different now. Because it is like a nightmare that haunted you as a child, that takes on the form of a blurred spectre and follows you invisibly. You are afraid to look behind you, but you cannot let yourself forget. Forget that you once lived in that impossible place with only a faint notion that something was wrong, that something about the loneliness and the peaks of the crags disappearing into the sombre skies was strange and looming and dangerous.

It all changed. He changed it.

The night that I was out on the moors, instead of in the house with the others.  
The night that the storm came, and I was in it.

The night that I met him.


	2. Chapter 2

The shrubs squelched satisfactorily underfoot. The patches of long grass rippled. The wind tugged at them, urging them into a frenzy. The white lace of my dress billowed around my ankles and caught on the heather.

The storms were approaching.

I had never been in a storm before. Outside. It was strange to hear the screaming of the house from without instead of within. It was more desperate, troubled, remote. As though somebody really were calling for help, lost in the gales and the rain. Inside, it had always sounded like a smoother sonorous note, like some thrumming living awareness that was stoked up by the tempest and delighted in its energy, the raw power of the world, the endless heath and the hills and the craggy heights.

I began to run. I didn't like it out here in the wet world, where you felt as though you were falling sideways, where nothing was quite safe or glad any more.

I was within a hundred yards of the front door when he appeared.

I'd always wondered, never known how he got there. I just looked out of the window, and there he was.  
Today I found out his secret.  
He sort of materialised in waves, back and forth, there and gone, until he stood all solid and real.  
I realised at that moment that he might be a spirit, and cowered from him.

But then he turned – we were only a few metres apart – and fixed me with such a stare that was both curious and mysterious, playful and solemn. I wasn't afraid any more. I felt as though I knew those eyes already. Adventure glinted in them like polished splinters of diamond. They winked, and sparkled, and leapt with things I had never seen but always dreamed of vaguely, things I could only catch the essence of sometimes in my flashing moments of inspiration.

"Who are you?" I called above the groaning gusts. The rain was folding around him as it always did, enveloping him with a shimmering beauty, drenching his hair and clothes. Strange clothes.

"I was going to ask you the same thing," he hollered back, suddenly grinning from ear to ear. "Why have you brought me here?"  
"I haven't. Why do you keep coming here?"  
"I don't!"

I lifted a bare foot out of the wet shrubs. Placed it tentatively in front of me, nearer to him. Slowly.  
I leaned my weight on it and began again with the other one, creeping like an animal towards his luminous figure.

"What is it with this place?" he looked about at the house. "I can't approach it. It won't let me near your door. All I can do is stand here, and you never come out. Is it always like this, the weather? What kind of timescape are we in? What are the coordinates?"

He was saying words I didn't fully understand. I wondered whether it was a good idea to be talking to him, to be offering him information of any kind. He might be very dangerous. The charm might be an act.

"I'm the Doctor, by the way."  
Out sprang a hand with wiggling fingers, eager and stark white against the greens and browns of the moor.  
I looked at it, and wondered what it was for, and whether he expected anything to be put into it.  
"Don't you do handshakes?"  
"What?"

"Handshakes. Look – see –" he grasped my whole hand in his, the rain cold between our skin, and jiggled his arm so that our wrists bobbed up and down together. "I'm _shaking _your hand. Hand-shake. It's how you say hello, in my favourite place in the Universe."

"Universe?"

He let me go abruptly, expression merging into quiet agitation.  
"What do you mean? Do you have a different word for it?"  
"For what?"  
"For the stars. For that thing you see when you look up. At night. Stars."  
"There's nothing but fog here. White fog above."

He gazed at me as though I had told him something entirely new and unpredictable, both infinitely exciting and chilling to his very bones.  
"You've never even seen the stars? What _are _you? What is this place?"

He turned his attention once again to the house, and for the first time I thought it looked menacing.

"Tell me," he said in a voice like soft thunder, "what have you been doing, out here all on your own for all this time?"  
"I'm not on my own," I ventured.  
"You're not? Who else is with you?"  
"The others."  
"What others? What are their names?"  
"The others."

I didn't understand the look of mute apprehension in his dusky green eyes.

"That house. How long have you lived in it?"  
"Forever."  
"Don't go back," he said without looking at me, only at that black façade of a weary howling traveller. "That place – there's something wrong with that place. Don't go near it again."  
"But it's my home. Where else am I going to go? There's only the moors."

Again he regarded me, again I felt like a particularly ugly and fascinating creature in a cage.

"You've never been past the hills? You've never looked over the mountains?"  
"There's nothing there."  
"How do you know? Did you look?"  
"I just know."

His gaze flickered to the towering crags that grew ominous under the grey clouds.  
He reached out and took my hand again.

"Show me."


End file.
